Optical packet switching networks are the foundation for next generation high speed Internet and are fast becoming the norm rather than an option. When such high speed optical networks are taken into account, one of the key considerations is packet buffering. The importance of packet buffering plays an even bigger role in optical networks because of the physical and technological constraints on the buffer sizes that can be implemented. Existing protocols, in many real world scenarios do not perform well in such networks. To eliminate such scenarios where there is a high possibility of packet loss, we use packet pacing. The proposed pacing scheme aims to reduce or eliminate packet losses arising from packet bursts in small-buffer networks. This thesis deals with a proposed hardware design and implementation of the packet pacing system on a NetFPGA. Our results show that the packet pacer can be implemented with a low overhead on hardware resources.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans own a smart phone, and 19% of Americans rely on their smartphone for either accessing valuable information or staying connected with their friends and family across the globe [15]. Staying always-on and always-connected to the Internet is one of the most important and useful features of a smartphone. This connection is used by almost every single application on the device including web browsers, email clients, messaging applications, etc. Unfortunately, the cellular networks on our smartphones are not perfect and do not always have cellular signal. Our devices often lose Internet connection when users are on the go and traveling. This thesis presents a novel in-depth implementation and evaluation of what we can achieve when a user loses network connectivity. BleHttp, a library for Android, was developed that uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect to other devices using a different carrier within close proximity of each other and make HTTP requests. In our results, we saw 100% success rates on HTTP requests with connected devices on a good connection. Average round trip times were tested to be as low as 1.5 seconds.

The Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is an amateur radio packet network that has evolved over the last several decades in tandem with, and then arguably beyond, the lifetime of other VHF/UHF amateur packet networks, to the point where it is one of very few packet networks left on the amateur VHF/UHF bands. This is proving to be problematic due to the loss of institutional knowledge as older amateur radio operators who designed and built APRS and other AX.25-based packet networks abandon the hobby or pass away. The purpose of this document is to collect and curate a sufficient body of knowledge to ensure the continued usefulness of the APRS network, and re-examining the engineering decisions made during the network’s evolution to look for possible improvements and identify deficiencies in documentation of the existing network.

Wi-Fi Sensing is becoming a prominent field with a wide range of potential applications. Using existing hardware on a wireless network such as access points, cell phones, and smart home devices, important information can be inferred about the current physical environment. Through the analysis of Channel State Information collected in the Neighborhood Discovery Protocol process, the wireless network can detect disturbances in Wi-Fi signals when the physical environment changes. This results in a system that can sense motion within the Wi-Fi network, allowing for movement detection without any wearable devices. The goal of this thesis is to answer whether Wi-Fi Sensing can enable useful applications at the enterprise level. The main applications we will focus on are presence detection and in-zone movement detection. Our contributions include: 1. A scalable, statistical analysis system that generates a heatmap and detects movement in a 12 x 9 meter zone with 98 percent accuracy, as well as a 6 x 9 meter zone with 88 percent accuracy. 2. A broad dataset collected for evaluation in an enterprise setting. 3. An end-to-end CSI data visualization and analysis application.

Today's mobile computing platforms provide new, convenient possibilities for location-based commercial activity. In particular, the global positioning system (GPS) provides location data for local advertising and retail activity. In this thesis, we take the next step and introduce the concept of micro check-in. Micro check-in is a simple framework that allows users to match their current location to specific objects or places at a resolution much finer than that allowed by GPS based check-in. We show that micro check-in enables customers to reveal their location at a fine level of granularity. By describing the concepts of points of service, service providers, users, and the enabling technology, we present a generalized, abstract, framework for designing, developing, and analyzing micro check-in based systems. We discuss several new applications that open up as a result of the combination of real-life and digital communication channel as a result of the micro check-in process. For example, micro check-in could prove quite useful to customers at a restaurant table, a gym equipment station, an exhibit at a museum and many more. This thesis studies micro check-in applied to the process of ordering food from a table at a restaurant and present the beneficial tradeoffs enabled by micro check-in. We find that the micro check-in framework has promising applications in several areas, but specifically utilize the restaurant application, OnTable, to prove the potential use of the micro check-in framework.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been widely adopted in many different applications in recent years, such as smart home applications. An adversary can capture the network traffic of IoT devices and analyze it to reveal user activities even if the traffic is encrypted. Therefore, traffic privacy is a major concern, especially in smart home applications. Traffic shaping can be used to obfuscate the traffic so that no meaningful predictions can be drawn through traffic analysis. Current traffic shaping methods have many tunable variables that are difficult to optimize to balance bandwidth overheads and latencies. In this thesis, we study current traffic shaping algorithms in terms of computational requirements, bandwidth overhead, latency, and privacy protection based on captured traffic data from a mimic smart home network. A new traffic shaping method - Dynamic Traffic Padding is proposed to balance bandwidth overheads and delays according to the type of devices and desired privacy. We use previous device traffic to adjust the padding rate to reduce the bandwidth overhead. Based on the mimic smart home application data, we verify our proposed method can preserve privacy while minimizing bandwidth overheads and latencies.

Satellites are playing an increasingly important role in collecting scientific information, providing communication services, and revolutionizing navigation. Until recently satellites were large and very expensive, creating a high barrier to entry that only large corporations and government agencies could overcome. In the past few years the CubeSat project at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) has worked to refine the design and launching of small, lightweight, and less expensive satellites called pico-satellites, opening space up to a wider audience. Now that Cal Poly has the launch logistics and hardware under control, a new problem has arisen. These pico-satellites are within communication range of a ground station only 40 minutes a day. This, combined with their 1200 bps communication speed, limits the usefulness of the satellite missions to those only transmitting small amounts of data back to Earth. This thesis proposes a novel protocol that allows a sparse network of pico-satellites to communicate among one another and to larger satellites called data mules, which relay the information back to the ground station at much higher speeds. The data mules are able to provide higher speeds because they are larger satellites with less power constraints. This protocol makes it possible for a pico-satellite to send more data over a given amount of time with less end-to-end delay. When every satellite has large amounts of data almost three times as much aggregate data can be sent through the network, and almost five times more data can be sent if only a single satellite has large amounts of data to send. The end-to-end delay is cut almost in half when sending 1 MB of data per day per satellite and is decreased by a factor of at least three when sending large amounts of data from only one satellite.

Security is a necessity when dealing with new forms of technology that may not have been analyzed from a security perspective. One of the latest growing technological advances are Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). VANETs allow vehicles to communicate information to each other wirelessly which allows for an increase in safety and efficiency for vehicles. However, with this new type of computerized system comes the need to maintain security on top of it. In order to try to protect location privacy of the vehicles in the system, vehicles change pseudonyms or identifiers at areas known as mix zones. This thesis implements a model that characterizes the attack surface of an adversarial insider vehicle inside of a VANET. This adversarial vehicle model describes the interactions and effects that an attacker vehicle can have on mix zones in order to lower the overall location privacy of the system and remain undetected to defenders in the network. In order to reach the final simulation of the model, several underlying models had to be developed around the interactions of defender and attacker vehicles. The evaluation of this model shows that there are significant impacts that internal attacker vehicles can have on location privacy within mix zones. From the created simulations, the results show that having one to five optimal attackers shows a decrease of 0.6%-2.6% on the location privacy of the network and a 12% decrease in potential location privacy in a mix zone where an attacker defects in a 50-node network. The industry needs to consider implementing defenses based on this particular attack surface discussed.

ABSTRACT High-Speed Mobile Networks for Modern Farming and Agricultural Systems J.Santos Najar-Ramirez High-speed mobile networks are necessary for agriculture to inventory individual plant health, maximize yield and minimize the resources applied. More specifically, real-time information on individual plant status is critical to decisions regarding the management of resources reserved and expended. This necessity can be met by the availability of environmental sensors (such as humidity, temperature, and pH) whose data is kept on storage servers connected to static and mobile local area networks. These static and mobile local area networks are connected to cellular, core and satellite networks. For instance, agricultural experts remotely working on vast acreage farms from business offices or while traveling can easily connect their notebook computers and other portable devices to these networks in order to check farm status, send email, read industry news or arrange a visit to neighbor farms or suppliers. Today, several mobile phone companies offer broadband service with 2Mbps downlink in rural and dense urban areas, however, they do not typically exist in farm areas. Although these networks (such as 802.11ac/n, 3G, 4G, etc) are significant achievements, they do not meet the projected needs of the agricultural industry. The present use model of high-speed networks for email and multimedia content, together with agriculture’s expected intensive use of real-time plant and environmental condition monitoring, with statistics/plots and real-time high resolution video, necessitates a highly integrated and highly available networked system. For agricultural experts, attentive to market needs, seamless high-speed wireless communication ‘anywhere, anytime at any speed’ is critical to enhancing their productivity and crop yields.

Content hosted on the Internet must appear robust and reliable to clients relying on such content. As more clients come to rely on content from a source, that source can be subjected to high levels of load. There are a number of solutions, collectively called load balancers, which try to solve the load problem through various means. All of these solutions are workarounds for dealing with problems inherent in the medium by which content is served thereby limiting their effectiveness. HTTP, or Hypertext Transport Protocol, is the dominant mechanism behind hosting content on the Internet through websites. The entirety of the Internet has changed drastically over its history, with the invention of new protocols, distribution methods, and technological improvements. However, HTTP has undergone only three versions since its inception in 1991, and all three versions serve content as a text stream that cannot be interrupted to allow for load balancing decisions. We propose a solution that takes existing portions of HTTP, augments them, and includes some new features in order to increase usability and management of serving content over the Internet by allowing redirection of content in-stream. This in-stream redirection introduces a new step into the client-server connection where servers can make decisions while continuing to serve content to the client. Load balancing methods can then use the new version of HTTP to make better decisions when applied to multi-server systems making load balancing more robust, with more control over the client-server interaction.